↖  美联储主席格林斯潘回忆录——动荡年代：勇闯新世界-the age of turbulence-4..

美联储主席格林斯潘回忆录——动荡年代：勇闯新世界-the age of turbulence-4

For the most part, the electronic flows of funds were doing fine. But 

with civilian air traffic shut down, the transportation and clearing of good 

old-fashioned checks were being delayed. That was a technical problem—a 

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substantial one, but one that the staff and the individual Federal Reserve 

banks were entirely capable of handling by temporarily extending additional 

credit to commercial banks. 

I spent most of my time in the days that followed watching and listening 

for signs of a catastrophic economic slowdown. For seven months before 

9/11, the economy had been in a very minor recession, still shaking off 

the effects of the dot-com crash of 2000. But things had started to turn 

around. We had rapidly been lowering interest rates, and the markets were 

beginning to stabilize. By late August public interest had shifted from the 

economy to Gary Condit, the California congressman whose less-thanforthcoming 

statements about a missing young woman dominated the 

nightly news. Andrea couldn't get on the air with anything of global significance, 

and I remember thinking how incredible that seemed—the world 

must be in pretty good shape if the TV news focused mainly on domestic 

scandal. Within the Fed, the biggest issue we faced was how far to lower interest 

rates. 

After 9/11, the reports and statistics streaming in from the Federal Reserve 

banks told a very different story. The Federal Reserve System consists 

of twelve banks strategically situated around the country Each one lends 

money to and regulates the banks in its region. The Federal Reserve banks 

also serve as a window on the American economy—officers and staff stay 

constantly in touch with bankers and businesspeople in their districts, and 

the information they glean about orders and sales beats official published 

data by as much as a month. 

What they were telling us now was that all across the country people 

had stopped spending on everything except items bought in preparation 

for possible additional attacks: sales of groceries, security devices, bottled 

water, and insurance were up; the whole travel, entertainment, hotel, tourism, 

and convention business was down. We knew the shipping of fresh 

vegetables from the West Coast to the East Coast would be disrupted by 

the suspension of air freight, but we were somewhat surprised by how 

quickly many other businesses were hit. For example, the flow of auto parts 

from Windsor, Ontario, to Detroit's plants slowed to a crawl at the river 

crossings that join the two cities—a factor in the decision by Ford Motor to 

shut down temporarily five of its factories. Years earlier, many manufacturers had shifted to "just-in-time" production—instead of stockpiling parts 

and supplies at the plant, they relied on air freight to deliver critical components 

as they were needed. The shutdown of the airspace and the tightening 

of borders led to shortages, bottlenecks, and canceled shifts. 

In the meantime, the U.S. government had gone into high gear. On Friday, 

September 14, Congress passed an initial emergency appropriation of 

$40 billion and authorized the president to use force against the "nations, 

organizations, or persons" who had attacked us. President Bush rallied the 

nation with what will likely go down as the most effective speech of his 

presidency. "America was targeted for attack because we're the brightest 

beacon for freedom and opportunity in the world," he said. "And no one 

will keep that light from shining." His approval ratings soared to 86 percent, 

and politics, if only for a short period, became bipartisan. Lots of ideas 

were being floated on Capitol Hill for helping the nation bounce back. 

There were plans that involved pumping funds into airlines, tourism, and 

recreation. There was a raft of proposals to extend tax breaks to businesses 

in order to encourage capital investment. Terrorism insurance was much 

discussed—how do you insure against such catastrophic events, and what 

role, if any, does the government have in that? 

I thought it urgent to get commercial aircraft flying again, in order to 

abort all the negative ripple effects. (Congress quickly passed a $15 billion 

air transport rescue bill.) But beyond that, I paid less attention to most of 

these debates, because I was intent on getting the larger picture—which 

still wasn't clear to me. I was convinced that the answer would not lie in 

big, hasty, expensive gestures. It's typical that in times of great national urgency, 

every congressman feels he has to put out a bill; presidents feel the 

pressure to act too. Under those conditions you can get shortsighted, ineffective, 

often counterproductive policies, like the gasoline rationing that 

President Nixon imposed during the first OPEC oil shock in 1973. (That 

policy caused gas lines in some parts of the country that fall.) But with 

fourteen years under my belt as Fed chairman, I'd seen the economy pull 

through a lot of crises—including the largest one-day crash in the history of 

the stock market, which happened five weeks after I took the job. We'd 

survived the real-estate boom and bust of the 1980s, the savings and loan 

crisis, and the Asian financial upheavals, not to mention the recession of 

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1990. We'd enjoyed the longest stock-market boom in history and then 

weathered the ensuing dot-com crash. I was gradually coming to believe 

that the U.S. economy's greatest strength was its resiliency—its ability to 

absorb disruptions and recover, often in ways and at a pace you'd never be 

able to predict, much less dictate. Yet in this terrible circumstance, there 

was no way to know what would happen. 

I thought the best strategy was to observe and wait until we understood 

better what the precise fallout from 9/11 would be. That is what 

I told the congressional leadership in a meeting in the House Speaker's 

office on the afternoon of September 19. Speaker Dennis Hastert, House 

minority leader Dick Gephardt, Senate majority leader Trent Lott, and 

Senate minority leader Tom Daschle, along with Bob Rubin, the former 

secretary of the treasury under President Clinton, and White House economic 

adviser Larry Lindsey, all met in a plain conference room attached 

to Hastert's office on the House side of the Capitol. The legislators wanted 

to hear assessments of the economic impact of the attacks from Lindsey, 

Rubin, and me. There was great seriousness to the ensuing discussion—no 

grandstanding. (I remember thinking, This is the way government should work.) 

Lindsey put forward the idea that as the terrorists had dealt a blow to 

American confidence, the best way to counter it would be a tax cut. He and 

others argued for pumping about $100 billion into the economy as soon as 

possible. The number didn't alarm me—it was about 1 percent of the country's 

total annual output. But I told them we had no way of knowing yet 

whether $100 billion was too much or too little. Yes, the airlines and the 

tourism industries had been severely impacted, and the newspapers were 

full of stories about all sorts of layoffs. Yet on Monday, September 17, amazingly, 

the New York Stock Exchange had succeeded in reopening just three 

blocks from Ground Zero. It was an important step because it brought a 

sense of normalcy back to the system—a bright spot in the picture we were 

still piecing together at the Fed. At the same time, the check payment system 

was recovering, and the stock market hadn't crashed: prices had merely 

gone down and then stabilized, an indication that most companies were 

not in serious trouble. I told them the prudent course was to continue to 

work on options and meet back in two weeks, when we'd know more. 

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I delivered the same message the next morning to a public hearing of the 

Senate Banking Committee, counseling patience: "Nobody has the capacity 

to fathom fully how the tragedy of September 11 will play out. But in the 

weeks ahead, as the shock wears off, we should be able to better gauge how 

the ongoing dynamics of these events are shaping the immediate economic 

outlook." I also emphasized, "Over the past couple of decades, the American 

economy has become increasingly resilient to shocks. Deregulated financial 

markets, far more flexible labor markets, and, more recently, the 

major advances in information technology have enhanced our ability to absorb 

disruptions and recover." 

In fact, I was putting a better face on the situation than I feared might 

be the case. Like most people in government, I fully expected more attacks. 

That feeling went mainly unspoken in public, but you could see it in the 

unanimity of the Senate votes: 98-0 for authorizing the use of force against 

terrorists, 100-0 for the aviation security bill. I was particularly concerned 

about a weapon of mass destruction, possibly a nuclear device stolen from 

the Soviet arsenal during the chaos of the collapse of the USSR. I also contemplated 

the contamination of our reservoirs. Yet on the record I took a 

less pessimistic stance because if I had fully expressed what I thought the 

probabilities were, I'd have scared the markets half to death. I realized I 

probably wasn't fooling anybody, though: people in the markets would 

hear me and say, "I sure hope he's right." 

In late September, the first hard data came in. Typically, the earliest 

clear indicator of what's happening to the economy is the number of new 

claims for unemployment benefits, a statistic compiled each week by the 

Department of Labor. For the third week of the month, claims topped 

450,000, about 13 percent above their level in late August. The figure confirmed 

the extent and seriousness of the hardships we'd been seeing in 

news reports about people who'd lost their jobs. I could imagine those 

thousands of hotel and resort workers and others now in limbo, not knowing 

how they would support themselves and their families. I was coming to 

the view that the economy was not going to bounce back quickly. The 

shock was severe enough that even a highly flexible economy would have 

difficulty dealing with it. 

(未完待续, To be contd)
 

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